The life of Bill Hemmer, the least controversial personality at Fox News

Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer. James Pasley / Business Insider

In January, Bill Hemmer took over Shepard Smith’s slot on Fox News and now hosts “Bill Hemmer Reports.”
He plays an important role as the chief news anchor of the president’s favorite TV channel.
He’s been on-air for the last 25 years, getting his start in local news in Cincinnati before moving to CNN and working his way up the ranks. In 2005, he jumped to Fox News.
After 15 years since joining the network, he’s now leading the station’s news coverage.
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Bill Hemmer chooses his words carefully.

In January 2020 he took over Fox News’ 3 p.m. hour-long news slot. He was taking over from Shepard Smith, who resigned from Fox after reporting for the station since its start in 1996.

Hemmer has been an anchor at Fox News for 15 years, but this is the first time he’s had his own show. In his career — much of it also at Fox’s rival, CNN — he’s covered atrocities like the Boston Marathon Bombing, the Haiti earthquake, and the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. He’s also covered a number of presidential elections.

It’s a high-stakes gig. Fox News is the president’s favorite TV channel. And at times, there’s been tension between Fox employees on the news side of the station, like Smith, and on the opinion side, like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity — to name two of President Donald Trump’s favorite personalities. And Hemmer has been an important voice in informing Fox News’ viewers about the coronavirus, interviewing the likes of Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases.

In an interview with Insider in January, Hemmer was enthusiastic about his role but careful about talking about whether he was nervous about taking over Smith’s high-profile slot.

“Well,” he said, “I want to get it right.”

“I’ve felt for a long time that your best preparation — sorry, your best defense — in this industry is your own preparation,” he added.

He’s been preparing for quite some time. His life, he said, was full of “data points.” There was the German professor who convinced him to get out of the US and move to Luxembourg. There was watching the Iran-Contra deal unfold on CNN in 1987, as well as the impact of an early “mid-life crisis” that saw him quit his job and travel the world, sending back dispatches that later won him two Emmys.

Despite being in the public eye for 25 years, and unlike the opinion hosts he works alongside with at Fox News, he’s managed to avoid controversy.

On his Twitter, his most common tweet appears to be a simple, uncontroversial weekly reminder: “Friday, folks.” And as he told the Washington Post in 2010, “Knock wood, I think I’ve been lucky to, as my mother would say, be careful before you speak.”

Here’s what his life and career have been like so far.